1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to the field of computer-implemented cost allocation and accounting systems for projects and undertakings. More particularly, the present invention relates to computer-implemented cost assignment methods and systems that enable a flexible and dynamic assignment of costs to a specific task through a rule-based Task Auto Assignment engine.
2. Description of the Related Art
Modem society is demonstrably increasingly dependent upon highly complex and technologically based objects of manufacture such as factories, airplanes, ocean liners, offshore oil rigs, launch vehicles and automobiles, for example. Each of these typically requires the manufacture and assembly of many thousands (if not millions) of components. The actual cost of each constituent component may include many other costs, such as the cost of the material used to manufacture the component, the cost of purchasing the component and/or the resource costs associated with the component, among others. The cost(s) of each constituent component must be collected and tracked over the lifetime of the project to provide a realistic assessment of the actual cost of the object manufactured. This assessment is necessary to determine the overall profitability of the project and/or to compare budgeted and actual costs of individual tasks within the project. To track this myriad of costs necessitates a sophisticated information infrastructure.
This sophisticated information infrastructure is typically broken down into a hierarchy of interrelated tasks, each logically associated with a project. In the case of the manufacture a aircraft, for example, a logical tree structure (also sometimes called a Work Breakdown Structure or WBS) might be created to store information relating to each of the individual tasks that must be performed to manufacture and to deliver the finished aircraft to the customer. The organization of such a logical tree structure may be modeled upon the physical structure of the object and/or may be based upon other workflow or accounting considerations.
FIG. 1 shows an example of a logical tree structure 100 that may be created to track the costs of performing the individual constituent tasks of a manufacturing project, as well as the overall cost of the project itself. The structure 100 is a hierarchical structure including a top-level project P1 and a plurality of tasks hierarchically associated therewith. For example, the project P1 may correspond to the manufacture of an aircraft, or a significant portion thereof. Project P1, as shown in FIG. 1, has a number of tasks associated therewith. These tasks may correspond to the manufacture, assembly or testing of major components of the aircraft, such as the fuselage, the wings, the avionics, etc. For example, task P1T1 in level 1 may correspond to the manufacture, assembly and/or integration of the fuselage, whereas task P1T2 in level 1 may be related to the assembly of the avionics system. Still other tasks, such as the manufacture of the wings or the electrical system are collectively referenced in FIG. 1 by the dashed lines extending from the solid lines of the WBS. In turn, each of the tasks in level 1 may include other tasks associated therewith, located at hierarchically lower levels. For example, task P1T1 may have at least tasks P1T11 and task P1T12 in level 2 associated therewith (in a parent-child relationship, for example). In turn, task P1T11 may be hierarchically associated with level 3 tasks P1T111, P1T112 whereas task P1T12 may be associated with tasks P1T121 and P1T122. Still lower level tasks, in turn, may be associated with each of the aforementioned level 3 tasks. The tasks hierarchically associated with task P1T2 may be similarly organized, as a series of hierarchically cascading tasks, each task potentially being associated with both lower level and higher level tasks, and each task being logically coupled to project P1 through hierarchically higher level tasks.
In the example shown in FIG. 1, each task associated with project P1 corresponds to some undertaking, action, or transaction necessary to complete the manufacture of an aircraft. Each of these undertakings, actions or transactions, therefore, may incur a cost to the manufacturer or to some outside contractor. Each of these costs must be collected and assigned to the proper task within the hierarchical tree structure 100. In this manner, project leaders, task leaders and accountants may determine the actual cost of manufacturing the entire project (an aircraft, for example) or the actual cost of manufacturing any constituent portion thereof. For example, to ascertain the cost of task P1T21 (a portion of the avionics system, for example), all of the costs associated with hierarchically lower-level tasks will be rolled up (aggregated and summed) into task P1T21. That is, the costs assigned to tasks P1T211, P1T2111, P1T21111, P1T211111, P1T211112, P1T211113, P1T2111131, P1T21111311, as well as the costs assigned to task P1T212 (and any lower level tasks associated therewith) will be added to the cost assigned to task P1T21 to yield the actual cost of manufacturing the aircraft sub-assembly associated with task P1T21. Moreover, budgeted costs may also be assigned to each task within the tree 100, and/or to the entire project 100, making actual versus budgeted comparisons possible. These costs, along with other information, may be stored in data structures (such as tables, for example) maintained in a computerized database.
Although of great value to accountants and corporate decision-makers, such a data structure can be highly burdensome to populate and to maintain with the appropriate task-related data. Indeed, the data entry burden associated with the structure shown in FIG. 1 (and similar structures) is significant and can negatively impact the cost of the entire project. For example, should the costs associated with task P1T12121 be inadvertently assigned to task P1T12122, the actual costs later reported for both of these tasks will be in error. Moreover, the time required for manually entering such costing data can be great. Understandably, the risk of erroneous cost assignment generally increases with the number of tasks within the project. When tasks are manually entered, it becomes foreseeable (and even likely) that some costs may inadvertently be assigned to an incorrect task or tasks, as the miskeying or transposition of a single digit in a task number or identifier will change the task to which the cost is assigned. Additionally, to correctly assign a cost to a particular project and task requires a detailed knowledge of the hierarchical tree structure, often an unlikely proposition for personnel assigned to data entry. What are needed, therefore, are methods, devices and systems that alleviate the burden of manually entering and assigning these costs to specific tasks, and that reduce the risk of incorrect cost assignments.
Each of the tasks shown in FIG. 1 may itself be an aggregate cost of several task-specific costs. Indeed, within the cost allocated to each task may be included a number of individual sub-costs relating to, for example, the cost of materials used in performing the task, the resource cost (such as the cost of running a machine tool for example), the cost of packaging the sub-assembly and/or the personnel cost of performing the task. The cost of correctly assigning these sub-costs to specific sub tasks may itself constitute an impermissibly great burden upon the project. Often, therefore, the benefits of such increased granularity in the cost assignment process may be outweighed by the corresponding disadvantages of increased data entry. For this reason, these sub-costs are typically aggregated together within the cost assigned to a task, making it difficult (or impossible) for the accountants to extract, derive or reproduce them later. Therefore, although a task may be running greatly over budget, the true cause of the cost overrun for that task may be identified (if at all) only with difficulty, as the sub-cost causing the overrun may have been subsumed into the overall cost of the task. Additionally, in the case wherein the material cost for a particular task is greater than expected and the cost of another resource for the same task is smaller than expected, the material cost overrun may not be detected or detectable, as these sub-costs may have been aggregated upon assigning the cost to the task.
One potential solution would be to assign each of these sub-costs to a separate task and to logically couple the new tasks within the WBS for that project. However, it may be appreciated that doing so may vastly complicate an already ungainly logical structure and conventionally imposes new and often excessively burdensome demands upon data processing resources and data entry. What are needed, therefore are methods and systems for assigning costs to tasks within a project organizational structure that reduce data entry requirements while maintaining consistent cost assignment results. What are also needed are methods and systems that allow for improved tracking of material and resource costs (among other costs), within and across tasks of a project.
It is an object of the present invention, therefore, to provide methods, devices and systems that alleviate the burden of manually entering and assigning costs and other values to specific tasks, and that reduce the risk of incorrect assignments. It is a further object of the invention to provide methods, devices and systems to assign values to specific tasks (or other functional entities) within a logical structure in an automatic and consistent manner. A still further object of the present invention is to provide methods, devices and systems that allow for improved tracking of material and resource costs (among other transaction-related values and/or user-definable transaction-related elements), within and across tasks of a project.
In accordance with the above-described objects and those that will be mentioned and will become apparent below, a computer implemented method of assigning a value associated with a manufacturing or service-related project-based transaction to one of a plurality of tasks within an organizational logical structure, includes steps of retrieving at least one attribute of the transaction. Such attribute(s), in the case of a resource-related transaction, may include an identification of the operation code, the job number and/or job prefix, an identification of the assembly and/or and identification of the relevant department code, for example. A plurality of predefined task assignment rules may then be searched for a matching rule that includes respective criteria corresponding to each retrieved attribute. Each of the plurality of task assignment rules includes an identification of a task within the organizational logical structure. The value associated with the transaction may then be assigned to the task identified in the matching rule.
According to an embodiment of the present invention, the value may include a cost associated with the transaction.